You know more songs by The Verve than you think you do. Sure, everybody knows the Stones pilfering classic ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ that was impossible to get away from in 1997, the band truly making ‘The Last Time‘ into their own Frankenstein’s monster, iconic and joyous, and of course, the far more downbeat, but equally ravishing ‘The Drugs Don’t Work‘ was the group’s sole chart-topper, in the official UK charts at least, but there was a lot more to them than those two songs, great though they undoubtedly were (and still remain).
I guess you could argue that, aside from those two tracks, the entirety of Urban Hymns album is instantly recognisable to many people too, so the gorgeous ‘Lucky Man‘ and the affecting ‘Sonnet‘ further consolidate their status as a classic band of the 1990s. However, it’s conceivable that the purest gold here comes from those earlier recordings that perfectly melded rock and shoegaze. So ‘Slide Away‘, off the band’s 1993 debut, feels fresh and quite thrilling all these years later, no doubt (in my mind, at least) inspiring the likes of Richard Hawley to form Longpigs amongst many other musical wannabes. With ‘All In The Mind‘ too, you can just smell the vibrancy of a young band starting out with their whole careers ahead of them, fresh-faced and excited by what the future may hold. Of course, while these pre-fame compositions – at the time simply by Verve without the ‘The’ – are far from inaccessible, it does feel fairly obvious, listening back now, that Richard Ashcroft’s songwriting would have to be honed somewhat if The Verve were going to achieve the kind of chart success that they would later achieve. And how.
There is a slight change, however, from the edition that first hit the shelves of record stores back in 2004, as the two previously unreleased tracks – ‘This Could Be My Moment‘ and ‘Monte Carlo‘ – which originally saw out This Is Music: The Singles twenty years ago, have been banished to the ether and replaced with ‘Love Is Noise‘ and ‘Rather Be‘, the two singles that came from The Verve’s 2008 long player, Forth. I think this was a good decision. There’s nothing wrong with either of those original album closers, but they do sound rather more dated than the rest of the record does, whereas ‘Love Is Noise‘ in particular, surprisingly, holds up rather well, sounding more like Echo and the Bunnymen at their most commercial than I’d ever noticed the first time around.
Perhaps best of all though is the replacement of the five-minute edit of the band’s second single, ‘She’s A Superstar‘ with the full-blown near-nine-minute version that basically feels like a narcotic-induced hit. Not that I’ve ever had a hit, admittedly, but it certainly seems very much like I would imagine a hit to feel. Musical Utopia, if you will.
Anyway, this 20th anniversary, which came out on Friday, is a double vinyl release, which features just three tracks per side on the first disc and four apiece on the second, but it’s the quality that counts over quantity, right? And this greatest hits collection, which is gorgeously packaged, to boot, has that in spades.
This Is Music: The Singles is out now on Universal/Virgin/EMI.
